


Destructive Drama

by Littlebluejay_hidingpeanuts



Category: Original Story
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-02-29 18:59:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18784225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Littlebluejay_hidingpeanuts/pseuds/Littlebluejay_hidingpeanuts
Summary: Mom worried about the closet door hitting her cherry wood bed.





	Destructive Drama

DESTRUCTIVE DRAMA

 

I was reading something on my computer and successfully ignoring the world at large. When I heard banging and then buzzing coming from my parents’ bedroom. My mother was accomplishing another demolishing attempt at getting my father to redecorate. That’s how it is in my family. To get my dad to put down a new wood floor, my mother ripped out the carpet. To get my dad to fix up the bathroom, she broke down the walls. Not the whole walls mind you, just the inner walls. Now she was hacking away at her closet, pulling off the doors and molding.. The only problem with most of these little adventures of hers, they take two sets of hands. You just try to guess who is the one who has to enable her insanity? Our conversation began quite similar to how most of our conversations begin:

 

“Can you help me?” My mother called from her bedroom.

 

“No,” I automatically responded keeping my eyes firmly on the computer screen. To look up or to respond in any other way was to admit defeat too soon. I had another ten minutes of bliss.

 

“Come on. Please?” She whined at me. She whined. She actually whined. She, the adult, the parent, whined to her only child.

 

“No.” I may be a little childish and stubborn.

 

“Come on. Come help me. I can’t do this alone. It will be really quick. It’s just a little thing.”

 

“Okay.” I am Queen of the one word answers. With that one word I received another ten minutes of freedom. Sadly, I was no longer actually reading, just staring at the screen like a rabbit in its hesitation of whether it was safe to stay quiet and still or if bolting would be the more successful enterprise.

 

“M. J., come help me!” Her hammering and sawing never missed a beat.

 

“Okay.” Once again I escaped with the promise that I would help. This time I actually did get some reading done, though all my muscles were still poised for flight.

 

“M. J., it’s been thirty minutes since I first asked you to help me. Come help!” I froze in my chair. Even my thoughts paused seeing what would happen.

 

“Madeleine Jennifer!!”

 

“Fine.” To try ‘okay’ again was too risky. I rose slowly and walked toward the bedroom. Hilariously, the distance from the computer to the bedroom door is the shortest distance in the house, so I didn’t have much leeway. That “fine” was a sigh and a whine and a groan combined, a phrase that scarily ended every single one of these conversations. I was apprehensive at what I would see in the room, so my eyes stayed unfocused until I was faced with the whimper-worthy destruction.

 

The closet was originally a double-doored hole in the wall about six feet high and three feet wide, topped with another double-doored cabinet, about a foot high and again three feet wide,that went to the ceiling. It was old, old-fashioned, kinda ugly and made of three quarter inch thick wood. Not ply-wood.

 

Now, the frame that held the whole thing together was pulled off around the closet, but still stuck on around the cabinet. The doors to the closet were open and hanging forward, holding the frame upright. My mother with her brand new reciprocating saw was cutting the frame into pieces that in theory would fit into the trash bin. She glanced at me to see if I was really there, reluctantly willing to help.

 

Normally when the closet doors are closed there is about fifteen inches between them and the bottom corner of the bed. Obviously she was tired of making sure each time she opened the door it didn’t bang against the bed’s frame. And the bed frame was made of Cherry, with a beautiful dark red color.

 

“It’ll be easy and quick, I promise. (Really! Did she expect me to believe her?) “I just want you to hold up the middle of the frame so I can cut this up.” She was pointing to the horizontal strut, between the bottom and top doors, which held the frame square.

 

I looked at the whole mess for a moment and said, “Ah. No. It’ll fall on me.” I sat on her bed and laid back. My parents have this cool sleigh bed frame, that has armrests, like on a chair, at the head and foot of the bed. If you sit on the foot of the frame, you can sort of perch there or fall back onto the bed. I looked at where she wanted me to hold the frame. The whole cabinet part, minus the doors, would be above my head still attached to the wall. As she cut, I would probably be holding the weight of the closet doors as well. So. Not only would it fall on my head, it would be heavy, too. And where she wanted me to hold would be a little too high for me to effectively lift anything.

 

“No, it won’t. Just hold right here. I just need you to keep it in place while I cut here and here.” She pointed to two vague places that seemed to be on either side of where I would be holding, thus cutting out the middle strut. This cut would be essentially useless. It was only later when I realized she meant the vertical struts that the doors were attached to. This too sounded ridiculous because once the cut was made the door would come crashing down. Given that the bed was currently two inches from the left door, already hanging open, the bed frame was likely to be damaged. I wanted nothing to do with it.

 

The whole thing was ludicrous, but I couldn’t help thinking that though my father should be the one doing this project, my mother was the only one who would actually get it done. It was just like all their landscaping projects. My mother digs big holes in the yard and my father finished by filling them up, but in unique and aesthetically pleasing ways.

 

“No, I don’t want to do it. It’ll come crashing down on me.” My mother glared at me. Oops. I swung myself back up to standing and helped. I tried to hold up the frame while just standing in front of it, but it wasn’t working.

 

“Go get a chair from the kitchen,” she suggested. I got a chair. I stood on the chair and faced the frame and tried to hold it up. “No. You have to hold it from the back.”

 

“Wut? Where all the nails are sticking out?” I looked at her incredulously, horrified. Not wanting to believe that she would put her own daughter in a position where she would almost assuredly be injured.

 

“I pulled most of the nails out,” she said.

 

I looked at the back of the frame where a line of sharp nails waited to puncture my hands. I glared at my mother. She continued a little contritely, “Okay, so just some of them. There’s enough space for your hands.”

 

My glare remained as I carefully lowered my head to get behind the frame. Once, finally, in place there was the bottom of the cabinet and the back of the chair at my back and the hole of the closet beyond and a row of sharp, shabby things to my front attached to a frame that kept me basically trapped. I couldn’t get back out without delicate maneuvering. “Can we get this over with?” I whined.

 

“All right, ready? Just hold the frame steady.” She got the saw blade in place and clicked it on. Nothing happened. Click, click, click. Still Nothing. We both looked over at the wall socket where the cord was plugged in. I couldn’t see it as the bed was in the way. But my mother saw that the cord was unplugged. “It’s unplugged,” she said and pulled on the cord, and held up the plug for me to see.

 

At this point I briefly wondered, why did she not use the socket on this side of the bed, and not the one on the far side of the room?

 

She then tried to get over to the plug and socket. Hopefully to mate them up. But she couldn’t. She was trapped, between the bed and the hanging door, and tried to push herself between the two inch gap. She got stuck. I laughed.

 

Pulling herself back, she laid the saw on the bed. (That blade could easily rip the duvet.)

 

“Don’t put that there. Put it on the chair. She did. “Just go over the bed.” She tried to swing her leg over the bed frame. Nope. Finally, she crawled across the bed, picked up the cord and tried to plug it in. Thunk. The cord stopped short. She pulled again. Thunk. (I giggled.)

 

Coming around the end of the bed, she looked at the situation, “The cord is under the leg of the chair.” She crawled back across the bed.

 

“No, I’ll just do this.” I placed my feet on either side of the saw, held onto the frame, and tilted the chair back. In a second the chair legs were in the air, she could grab the cord and..She stood in shock. I don’t know why, but she obviously didn’t know I was going to do that. She started laughing. Her laughter was infectious.

 

“Okay. Do it again. I’m ready this time.” I did. She pulled out the cord. We were both laughing hard now.

 

“I need to use the bathroom,” she said. I laughed harder. She crawled across the bed and left. Shrieks of laughter almost drowned out the sound of the kitchen door opening. My dad came to the bedroom door, saw me crouched over to avoid the nails, standing on a chair surrounded by the frame and doors, laughing. Bits of wood, tools, and cord surrounded the area.

 

Before he left for work that morning, the closet had been fine. Now it was a mess. He hadn’t even known there was a problem with the closet. He said, “Do I dare ask?”

 

Six months later, my mother had a custom-built, designer closet made of cedar and decorated with copper. Soon after she was eyeing the kitchen cabinets.

 

Fin.

 


End file.
